


Hellbound

by deepandlovelydark



Category: Il buono il brutto il cattivo | The Good The Bad and The Ugly (1966), Pathology (2008), Мор. Утопия | Pathologic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Angst, Hell, Inappropriate Humor, Sick Character, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 20:18:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17649203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: So they call the prairie a steppe, and the cattle aren't the usual breed, and the inhabitants of the town on the Gorkhon River hide innumerable secrets; but Blondie knows they must still be in the West.Tuco thinks they're somewhere else.





	Hellbound

This town needs healers. They’re not healers. 

“We should go,” Blondie says, studying the horizon out the window (a small shack, built from warped, imported lumber and ill-made nails; no surprises there). No damned official quarantine can stop them, if they choose to leave now; the prairie’s too wide, the routes of possible escape too many. “We should leave before they bring the army in.”

No one has said in so many words, that there are twelve days of epidemic to run before this town will be cleansed one way or the other. Nobody needs to. The knowledge of it weighs on them all like the foetid air, the stink of slaughtered cattle and diseased humans.

“It won’t work,” Tuco says, guzzling down twyrine as though he’s developed a taste for the stuff. “If we were still in New Mexico…but Blondie, my friend, we are a long way from home.”

“I saw a tumbleweed this morning, blowing in the wind. That man you killed was carrying  _escudos_. We couldn’t have crossed the border in a single night.”

“Not that border.” The bandit grins at him, starts tearing into a dripping steak with his teeth. The platter before him is piled with fresh meat, half-cooked, barely civilised. “No.”

Tuco has a theory for what’s going on, which like many things about him is both simple and unfathomably wrong. 

Tuco thinks that they’re dead. 

And going by past experience, once his partner has an idea fixed in his head there’s no getting it out again- but not this time. 

 “Who are you trying to convince, Blondie?”

“You. Who else?”

 _Yourself,_  drifts across the conversation; and Blondie vows not to listen to it. 

“Look at you,” he argues, shifting his weight against the table (his partner has already appropriated the solitary chair, so there's nowhere else to sit). “Half-sozzled, eating everything you can scavenge, that doesn’t sound like any corpse I ever heard of.”

Tuco pauses, mid-chew; pries off a hunk of beef to throw towards him. Its blood rolls across the wood between them, staining a dark spot on the dusty toe of his boot. “You know what that man told me, before he died? That this is a place where the air itself will kill, you starve to death in a day without food. Lucky thing one of us is listening.”

“I have been listening, and haven’t heard anything that you couldn’t account for with high altitude and bad crops.” Blondie ignores the meat. If this plague does come from poisoned cattle, it’ll be safer to stick with hardtack, and at present he has no appetite anyway. “Which is another point. Everyone is talking English, except that nomadic tribe on the outskirts, so you were wrong about that-“

“ _Y esos bastardos no estan hablando en inglés._ You hear English, I hear my mother tongue. You never heard that the devil can speak in tongues? Maybe that is what hell is,” Tuco says, suddenly contemplative. “You live here long enough, you turn into a devil yourself.“

There’s a point at which it’s easier to let his partner stay superstitious, than to argue any longer. “We’re leaving now. Where’d you stable the horse?” Bad luck only having the one mount, after that last escapade, but if they give the beast its head and don’t go too quickly, they can still make it out of here. 

“There is no horse.“

“Someone stole it?” Horse thieves they can deal with, so long as no one’s actually ridden it out of town yet. 

“The man stole it,” Tuco returns. “So I killed him. Nothing wrong with that, they all agreed.” 

“Which they? What happened?” If they have no horse because his partner’s swapped it for a bag of magic beans, he’ll tie the next noose himself…

“People happened,” Tuco says succinctly, and belches. The edge seems off his appetite, now; he starts in on the second steak with something approaching decorum. “Hungry people. A whole mob who knew we rode in with a clean animal, no taint of plague, I didn’t have enough bullets left to shoot them all down. So we had a little sacrifice. More tender than I would have thought, but that’s a gelding for you.” 

“You mean this is our horse,” Blondie remarks, finally shoving a knife into the steak before him. Holds it up as though it’s a reward poster, to be read and understood and thrown away. “What did I do, to deserve a partner such as you?”

“It was a good trade. I got medicine powders, fruit, coffee, anything they could find to barter. Our choice of clean houses to sleep tonight. For the next twelve days we live like kings, or what passes for it in this town.”

“I would have ridden that horse straight out of here. Gone to find help, and not come back till I had it.” He would have.  _Tuco_ should have; they’re not so different as all that, in knowing when to leave a bad situation behind. “Don’t tell me it was because you worried about leaving me.”

“You think that would have stopped me getting out of this plague hole, if I had the choice? There was no choice. We were both already dead.”

“No….”

“So we might as well be as comfortable as possible,” Tuco concludes. “Are you going to eat that steak, or not?“

This, then, is the difference between them; that faced with the choice of saving a few lives now, or a whole town a little later, his partner has chosen to be soft now and hard later. The wrong decision, Blondie knows in his bones; he wouldn’t have made that mistake if it was up to him. 

He cannot help, though perhaps he can hinder; he cannot heal; most of all he cannot ride off into the sunset and  _leave_ , and if anything was to make him believe all these bone-headed assurances about hell, it is the pinioned, aching fever in his very marrow, as though the disease percolating through his body was itself responsible for keeping him here, pulling him downwards as firmly as any rope- 

when he falls off the table and hits the floor, the steak falls squarely across his thigh, so he knows Tuco will be along sooner or later to collect it. 

That happens. What surprises him is when, after putting the meat back on the table, Tuco is gentle with him; pulling him over to the desiccated tick, covering him with a blanket. Ripping open a packet of white powder, that stings in his mouth as though it acts by burning out infection and everything else it encounters.

“If this is hell, why are you helping me?” 

(If this is hell, a fate he admittedly deserves, there should be no redemption nor relief.)

“I have a brother who wanted to be good. He cuts himself off from everyone, he doesn’t know when my parents start starving, he says rosaries in that monastery all day and never looks outside his own door. Good, you can shove that up-“ and Tuco gestures, with vicious rude intent. “The world was all hell anyway, but it was easier with a partner. You don’t die on me, Blondie, you hear? Better the devil I know…”

So it’s all self-interest, then. 

And it is that thought, the sure and safe awareness that there is a motive besides unreliable kindness to hold him and Tuco together, that comforts Blondie as the plague takes him. 

(Maybe they are in hell.)

(Maybe they aren’t.)

(Maybe it simply doesn’t matter.)


End file.
